Bob Hopkins races down the Van Zandt-Guinn Elementary School hallway, his polished black dress shoes clacking against the dull tile floor. Children's laughter and teachers' instructions pour out of the busy classrooms.

Even at 72, Hopkins moves swiftly, an urgent purpose in his every step. He is joined by two researchers from Tarleton State University whom he refers to as "PhDs," Dr. Heather Haan and Dr. Melissa Gaa.

"We're going to teach kids to be doctors and lawyers and Indian chiefs," Hopkins tells them.

Today is the first time Hopkins has met the researchers and the first time he has been to the Fort Worth school with his Tarrant County College speech students.

Hopkins, a Dallas philanthropist who also teaches business and speech classes at TCC and Eastfield College, is the creator of PAVE: Philanthropy and Volunteerism in Education. He calls it his plan to end poverty. He and his TCC students will teach kids social responsibility, which he hopes will help build self-esteem and change lives.

"It'll cut down on the robbing and smoking and drinking and ganging and banging and getting pregnant while young and all that stuff," Hopkins predicts.

He has chosen this school because of the extraordinarily high poverty rates in the neighborhood. Ninety percent of the students attending Van Zandt-Guinn receive assistance to pay for their school lunches, according to the school counselor. While the poverty rate in Tarrant County is 15.2 percent (U.S. Census Bureau), Hopkins says the rates in the area surrounding the school are about twice as high

PAVE evolved from an intervention program Hopkins started with high school students, then middle school students, in Dallas. He learned that the program could work with children as young as second-graders when he brought it to Mexico last year. Hopkins, who is fluent in Spanish, taught at the Universidad de Guanajuato with another group of his speech students.

From helping build four schools with other volunteers in Nepal to taking a "philanthropy cruise" along the coast of Costa Rica, Hopkins' life is consumed with helping others. He loves anything to do with art, charity and beauty. For the next three years, he'll be teaching these children about just that.

Hopkins started volunteering with Alcoholics Anonymous when he was a student at the University of Kansas University. He realized he had become dependent on alcohol, and decided that needed to change.

"Every Monday morning I'd have to apologize for the things I did -- like take off my clothes or have a car wreck or something," Hopkins says.

There was no intervention of friends and family. He just decided he needed to change the way he was living, so he got involved with AA.

That's when Hopkins met his partner, a charter faculty member at Eastfield College. Hopkins' partner was a speaker at an AA convention that Hopkins was attendingin New Orleans. After the speech, Hopkins asked him out for coffee. A couple of years later, he moved to Dallas, and the couple has been together ever since.

For 30 years after he moved to Texas, Hopkins worked to raise money for nonprofit organizations. Even though he says he has retired, Hopkins realized he could make a difference in the world through teaching as an adjunct professor.

That's what he's doing now, walking down a hallway with two researchers, telling them about his program. He turns right, walking through the door of a second-grade classroom whose walls are covered in colorful posters with tips on writing, math and science. One has a robot made out of gallon, quart, pint and other sized jugs. Another states, "Reading is cool," with a colorful drawing of a punk rocker carrying books. The right wall is home to tall yellow lockers covered in tape residue.

As he enters the room, tiny 7-year-old hands immediately reach out to Hopkins, offering handshakes. They squeeze his hand and look him in the eye, just as the speech students taught them.

"Nice to meet you," they say, smiling broadly.

Hopkins introduces himself, shakes hands, then sends the students back to their groups. TCC student Jamal Evans is one of the group leaders who is trying to make the children feel more at ease about talking. He squeezes his 6-foot, 3-inch frame into a second-grade-sized chair, his knees tucked in toward his chest as he sits at a low standing round table with a group of five 7-year-old boys.

He talks to them about sports and pets and video games. They offer up details about their own lives. One has a sister who is pretty but annoying. Another has a dog he takes for walks. Hopkins stands in the corner and watches as Evans listens to the children with interest. The student finds something to relate to with each child in his group.

Hopkins believes that becoming comfortable in these group discussions is the students' first step toward becoming more confident, caring people who have the power to make a positive impact in the world.

Over the next four weeks, they'll learn about respecting themselves and others, nonprofit organizations, giving to others and about philanthropy in general.

Hopkins wants the children, as well as his students, to appreciate the world around them and to learn social responsibilities such as recycling and keeping the planet clean. In that appreciation, he believes the children will become better citizens and that they will then change their parents, cousins, aunts and uncles. That chain effect is how he hopes to make a difference.

The children aren't the only ones impacted. The TCC students will change as they go through the program, too.

"A lot of my students will say, 'I had no idea what I was getting into by signing up for this course," Hopkins says. "The thing that keeps me really going in this kind of stuff is the [positive] feedback I get from my students."

Now Hopkins speeds up his pace. They're running short on the time they have with the children -- they only get one hour a week -- so he has to hurry.

He walks into the next room, where the children are telling each other and their new mentors about their home lives. When Hopkins begins talking, the children and their teacher sit silently and listen. At the first opportunity, the teacher has the children spell philanthropy for Hopkins. Beaming, the children shout out, "P-H-I-L-A-N-T-H-R-O-P-Y!"

"Who knows what philanthropy is?" Hopkins asks.

They tell him it's helping others, being nice to their neighbors and working with charities. He smiles at their knowledge of the word.

"You are all philanthropists," Hopkins tells them, emphasizing another major part of the PAVE program.

Hopkins has been raising and riding horses for more than 30 years. He tells the children about his horse, named Philanthropy, and how he takes the horse out to run and play with the other horses on the Caruth Arabian horse farm in Lone Oak, Texas.

Hopkins listens as the students, now standing in a loosely formed circle around the classroom, shout out their own hobbies: playing video games, painting, riding bikes, watching TV, reading. Hopkins says those hobbies will help them stay active and enjoy life. He hopes by encouraging them to pursue things they are passionate about that they'll be less likely to get in trouble as they get older.

When it's time for Hopkins and his students to leave, the second-graders beg them not to go, grabbing at the shirts and jackets of the speech studentswith whom they've spent the last hour.

"We'll be back next week," Hopkins promises. The children offer him and his students handshakes as they say goodbye.

Hopkins and his students move down the hall to a vacant kindergarten classroom, where he begins to ask them about their experience. The students tell Hopkins about how their groups showed off their reading skills, played in the school's garden or shared personal stories with them.

Hopkins reaffirms his confidence in his students, telling them they can come to him if they need ideas for what to do with their group, but he knows they can handle any challenges

Next, they address pregnancy, something that happens as early as the fifth grade now. Because many of the children have mothers or sisters who are pregnant, the subject has to be handled delicately.

"These children will repeat whatever they hear to their parents and siblings," Hopkins says. "We don't want to offend anyone here."

They will simply tell the children that they are not ready to have children until they have graduated college, and it would be ideal for them to be married.

Hopkins is most excited about teaching the kids about charities. His speech students will, over the next week, research various charities. He suggests the Ronald McDonald House, Goodwill and Susan G. Komen. Because they have just finished a week of raising money for Susan G. Komen, Hopkins hopes they will already have some understanding of the work charities do.

After the group wraps up, Hopkins dismisses his students, who walk out of the school together, talking about their first-day experiences with excitement, and he heads home to Dallas.

Hopkins lives in the Louis Wagner Home, a two-story, gray and black wood house with three shade trees in the front yard, and a historic marker attached to the wall just to the left of the front door. It was built in the late 1800s by a German immigrant who became a successful Dallas businessman.

In the large backyard, Hopkins tends a garden. He buys his vegetables from Jackson Weston, a former student who took one of his classes at Tarrant County College and another at the University of Texas in Arlington.

"So he's the best speaker in the city," Hopkins jokes.

Hopkins hasn't been to Weston's family-owned shop in more than a year because of his trip to Mexico. Since his neighbors and friends have already started planting their gardens, he decides to stop and get some vegetables on his way home.

Hopkins says basic human interaction has changed significantly just in his lifetime. He can remember times when someone in his community would be sick or wouldn't have money for food, and his mother would drag him with her to take dinner to their house.

"You don't see things like that any more," he says.

Hopkins has been working since he was 14 years old, starting at an A&W Root Beer stand in Garden City, Kansas. He used his earnings there to buy his first car. He worked three jobs during college and eventually earned his master's degree from Kansas State University.

"I've never made a lot of money, but I have always had whatever I wanted," he says. "If it was too expensive, I decided I didn't want it."

Hopkins received several small inheritances from his parents and his cousin Mary Ellen, which he used to create the Philanthropy in Texas magazine that he published between 2003 and 2008. Other than that, he's never had a penny he didn't earn through hard work, and he has always had room for is giving.

"I like to give because it makes me feel good," he says.

These days, Hopkins' work is focused on his enthusiastic second-graders. He will be running the PAVE program with these children for the next three years. Hahn and Gaa will gather data to measure changes in the students and hopefully show that PAVE can change lives.

"We'll change the program however we have to," Hopkins says. "If one of the researchers comes to me and says, 'We've found that shaking hands is detrimental to the mental health of these students,' we'll stop shaking hands."

While he hopes to go back to Mexico one day to continue his program there, for now, he's excited about squeezing into kindergarten-sized chairs in windowless classrooms in Fort Worth and helping the children who learn there.